AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal.
If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer. The WSJ reports that the company currently receives about 15 million queries a day and brings in around $50 million in annualized revenue.
Perplexity uses AI to help people search the web in a chatbot-style interface. Some news publishers have accused the company of unauthorized web scraping and plagiarism, and The New York Times has even sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with publishers and has “no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here.”
These fundraising talks come after OpenAI announced raising a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation. While products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the line between chatbot and search engine, the company is moving more directly into search with SearchGPT.
A Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment on the WSJ report.
